TY  - JOUR
AU  - Doyle,Joseph J., Jr.
TI  - Child Protection and Adult Crime: Using Investigator Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of Foster Care
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13291
PY  - 2007
Y2  - August 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13291
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13291.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Joseph J. Doyle, Jr.
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-515
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/452-3761
Fax: 617/258-6855
E-Mail: jjdoyle@mit.edu
AB  - Nearly 20% of young prison inmates spent part of their youth in foster care - the placement of abused or neglected children with substitute families.  Little is known whether foster care placement reduces or increases the likelihood of criminal behavior.  This paper uses the placement frequency of child protection investigators as an instrument to identify causal effects of foster care placement on adult arrest, conviction, and imprisonment rates.  A unique dataset that links child abuse investigation data to criminal justice data in Illinois allows a comparison of adult crime outcomes across individuals who were investigated for abuse or neglect as children.  Families are effectively randomized to child protection investigators through a rotational assignment process, and child characteristics are similar across investigators.  Nevertheless, investigator placement frequencies are predictive of subsequent foster care placement, and the results suggest that school-aged children who are on the margin of placement have lower adult arrest rates when they remain at home.
ER  -